The man heading the One Laptop Per Child program says the next technology produced under the scheme will likely be a tablet device rather than a netbook. He has also come up with a new target for the cost of the program.

In an interview with Xconomy, Nicholas Negroponte said plans to follow up the original XO Laptop with a twin-screen netbook-style machine had been ditched. (Though he didn’t specifically state this, it appears this is down to cost constraints.)

Instead the next machine will effectively be a tablet computer: the size of a sheet of paper, a quarter-inch thick, made entirely of waterproof plastic. He described the model as “unbreakable”, which sounds like a challenge to the world’s children, but with the design set to have no recessed or holes it should certainly be sturdy.

Negroponte discussed some of the numbers involved in the project to date: he noted that there are 1.1 million XO Laptops in circulation, with orders for another 400,000 to 700,000. The project has also distributed more than a million digital books.

However, he wouldn’t be drawn on future targets, instead arguing that numbers are no longer important at this point. His view is that the real goal was to establish the concept of producing laptops, and that this has been achieved.

While the original promotional point of manufacturing the laptops for less than $100 each appears to have been overly ambitious, Negroponte maintains that the total cost of producing the laptops, maintaining them and connecting children to the Internet works out at a dollar per child per week. He describes this figure as high for some countries “but not outrageous”.

The program recently achieved a milestone when Uruguay became the first country in the world where every child does indeed have a laptop. However, there have been concerns there that the machines break too easily and that there have been Internet connection problems in some regions.

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Entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 10:10 am under Internet, Notebook, Technology.

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